Jean Harris, Scarsdale Diet Doctor Killer, Dead At 89

Jean Harris was a girls’ school headmistress who spent 12 years in jail after killing her lover, “Scarsdale Diet” doctor Herman Tarnower.

She had claimed the shooting of Tarnower, 69, was an accident. Convicted of murder in 1981, Harris suffered two heart attacks while serving her sentence in the Bedford Hills women’s prison north of New York City. She was granted clemency by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo when she underwent heart bypass surgery in December 1992 and was released on parole three weeks later.

She later founded Children of Bedford Inc., a nonprofit organization to provide scholarships and tutoring for children of female prison inmates.

Her trial for shooting Tarnower, the millionaire cardiologist famous for devising the Scarsdale Diet – a weight-loss book and sensation of the 1970s named for the New York suburb where he practiced – brought feminists rallying to her defense.

They pictured her as a woman victimized by a male-dominated society, adrift because she was getting older and her lover of 14 years was brushing her off in favor of his younger office assistant. In addition, they said, she was in the thrall of antidepressant drugs Tarnower had prescribed for her.

The case inspired two made-for-television movies, “The People vs. Jean Harris,” which aired not long after her 1981 conviction, and “Mrs. Harris,” which ran on HBO in 2006.